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October 29, 2015

Do I Have to Say Hello? Aunt
Delia’s Manners Quiz for Kids and Their Grownups. By Delia Ephron. Drawings
by Edward Koren. Blue Rider Press. $24.95.

Emily Post this isn’t. Or,
rather, Emily Post this is, sort of,
but with a far lighter approach to life and far less concern about minutiae.
Delia Ephron spends no time on matters such as the correct order in which to
use utensils in a fancy restaurant. She is much more interested in asking what
you should do in that fancy restaurant if you notice a fly swimming in your
soup. The three choices: “Do you swat it?” “Do you eat it?” “Do you say,
‘Excuse me,’ to the waiter, ‘but a fly is swimming in my soup’?” Lest there be
any uncertainty about the best response (there is no answer key here!), Edward
Koren’s perfectly apt but marvelously outlandish illustrations show a little
girl standing by a giant bowl of soup, wielding a fly swatter; a little girl
about to devour a fly that is as large as her head and is sporting a bewildered
expression; and a little girl talking politely to the waiter as a fly almost
the size of the soup bowl does what appears to be the Australian crawl.

Ephron and Koren have so
much fun with matters of manners that kids (and parents) will inevitably have
fun with the topic, too. And a good thing: upcoming holidays are always fodder
for figuring out the right thing (and many wrong things) to say. For example,
“Which of these are appropriate subjects for Thanksgiving dinner conversation? Whether
the turkey knew it was going to die. The time cousin Michelle laughed so hard
while eating that a hot dog came out of her nose. Stink bombs. Pilgrims.”
Remember, there is no answer key!

Most pages of Do I Have to Say Hello? are filled with
questions and potential answers, but a few are crammed with illustrations that
may make some adults wonder whether they have wandered by mistake into The New Yorker, to which Koren
frequently contributes cartoons. For example, one two-page spread is called “The
Noise Chart” and asks, “Which noises are acceptable at the dinner table?” There
are 10 possibilities here, and examining the kids’ expressions will not provide
any clues: whether going “cluck,” “ugh,” “moo” or “yech,” the kids are smiling
and appear to be thoroughly enjoying themselves. Parents should warn of
incipient expression changes if their
kids are caught making most of these sounds (“mmmmMMMMMM” is acceptable).

There are the usual subjects
here for kids interested in manners (or being forced to pay attention to them):
visiting, eating, car, school, playground, birthday party. But there are some
unexpected areas as well, and some possible responses that may take a bit of
time to think through. Under “Beach Manners,” for instance, is the question,
“Which of these things is it okay to say in a loud voice at the beach?” There
are six possibilities given: “Oh, it’s so beautiful here.” “The sand in my suit
is making my butt itch.” “Why is that man so fat?” “Boy, did that bathroom
smell.” “Aunt Delia, that woman isn’t wearing a top.” “Sharks! Sharks!” Now,
the first of these is clearly intended to be the right answer, but maybe it would be all right for a child to
comment on a topless beachgoer, and it would certainly be acceptable to shout about sharks if there were in fact
any swimming around. Do I Have to Say
Hello? invites kids and their parents to discuss just these sorts of issues
– that is, to consider what it is appropriate to say, where and when, and under
what circumstances.

Among the other
out-of-the-ordinary sections here are ones on soccer manners (including goalie
and referee bonus questions), movie manners (including bonuses for the candy
counter and for popcorn – with response ratings ranging from G to R), and video
game manners. From this section: “Yikes, a zombie is coming after you. Aunt
Delia says, ‘How was school this week, sweetie?’ What is the most polite
answer?” The choices are: “Not now, I’m busy.” “NOT NOW, I’M BUSY!” “May I
please tell you later? I’ve got zombie problems.” “You just made me die.” Now
there’s a scenario missing from all old-fashioned etiquette books!

The point is that Do I Have to Say Hello? is distinctly
and deliberately not old-fashioned,
and yet there is an undercurrent of politeness and deference to others here
that is just as important as in more-traditional etiquette books. And just as
Ephron is expert at coming up with three or more bad choices for every good
one, so Koren does a wonderful job of finding lots of wrong things to show and
just one or a few that are right. The Ephron-Koren team is a winning one
throughout. One page in the video-game section, for instance, is a “Facial
Expression Chart” proffering the question, “Which expressions are the most
likely to get you more time for playing video games? Which are the least
likely?” Kids can look at the eight possibilities, then look in a mirror, and
try to figure that one out on their own. There is a pervasive sense of fun here
– not something usually associated with manners books. Even soup can be fun,
and not just when there are flies in it. A page called “Tricky Question 4”
asks, “Who is using the soupspoon properly?” There are only three drawings
here, one showing a girl eating soup, one showing a girl using a gigantic spoon
as a canoe paddle, and one showing a boy during a downpour, using a huge spoon
as an umbrella. The answer, obviously, is that all three are proper soupspoon
uses – if you happen to have a gigantic spoon and no paddle or a huge spoon and
no umbrella during heavy rain. This is probably not the intended answer, but at least kids who use the spoons those ways
won’t end up eating flies. But beware, parents, of children who think about
their responses too creatively: they may grow up with a sense of humor akin to
those of Ephron and Koren. Uh-oh.

Pete the Cat and the Bedtime
Blues. By Kimberly and James Dean. Illustrations by James Dean. Harper.
$17.99.

Books call on and celebrate
the imaginary all the time, but Imaginary
Fred does so in a most unusual and thought-provoking way. Eoin Colfer’s
tale is about the sort of imaginary friend that so many children have – except
that Fred, it turns out, is sort of not imaginary, even though he sort of is.
It is the uncertainty of just what Fred is and what he can be that so enlivens
Colfer’s book. The story starts simply enough: Fred is clearly imaginary,
appearing as needed to various children who enjoy his company until they make
real-world friends and no longer need Fred – at which point he fades away and
blows into the clouds, where he waits until another “lonely little child” needs
him. Oliver Jeffers’ illustrations, mostly done in black-and-white with small dips
or slashes of color, are quite wonderful, and his way of portraying Fred as a
boy-shapedgrouping of small blue dots
lends the character just enough solidity and just enough otherworldliness. We
see Fred as the imaginary friend of quite a few children – and then we get to
the meat of the story, as Fred “dreamed of a friend who liked reading, music,
and drama like [sic] he did” and,
most importantly, with whom he could stay without fading away. Sure enough,
Fred seems to make just the right connection when he is wished for by “a lonely
boy named Sam,” and soon the two are inseparable, listening to music together,
acting together in plays they write, and walking along reading books together
(in an amusing in-joke, Sam is seen reading Colfer’s Artemis Fowl). Sam and Fred become so close that they proclaim
themselves the Dramatic Duo – but Fred knows that, just as in the past, at some
point Sam will find a real friend and that will be the end of the relationship.
What happens, though, is stranger and more unexpected than that. Sam does find
a real friend, a girl named Sammi, and Sammi has an imaginary friend of her own
named Frieda (the similar names of the friends are part of the book’s charm).
The four characters, two real and two imaginary, become a quartet – literally,
since they play instruments together and Sammi’s dream is to perform at
Carnegie Hall. A happy ending? Not quite – and this is where the book gets
strange. The four do perform together at a school concert, under the name “the
Quarrelling Quartet,” but the audience sees only two of them even though
readers see all four (Fred made of blue and Frieda of yellow ones). And then,
Colfer explains, in time the friends do grow apart, with the two real ones
spending more time doing what they like and the two imaginary ones going their
own, more-musical way – a way that leads them to, yes, Carnegie Hall, as the
Dramatic Duo (the name now applying to the two imaginary friends), “much to the
confusion of the audience.” Colfer and Jeffers deliberately leave matters
unexplained: one audience member is saying “aren’t they wonderful?” while
another is asking “when does it start?” Are the imaginary friends playing or
not? Are they visible or not? Audible or not? What exactly is going on? Well,
Colfer says that imaginary scientists do not know either, so they – one a
constellation of pink dots, another a grouping of green ones – study and do
research and finally can agree only that “friendship is friendship. Imaginary
or not, the same laws apply.” What those laws are, neither Colfer nor Jeffers
makes clear – and that is all to the good, as the book ends happily but with a
distinct lack of certainty about just what has happened and why, leaving it up
to young readers (and perhaps their equally puzzled parents) to figure out just
what friendship really means, and just what Imaginary
Fred is all about.

Matters are much clearer in Pete the Cat and the Bedtime Blues, in
which Pete, Alligator, Gus the platypus, and Grumpy Toad are having so much fun
at the beach that they do not want the day to end, so they decide to have a
sleepover. Good idea, but things do not go quite as planned, because one by
one, Pete’s friends think of things they want to do other than sleep: Grumpy
Toad wants to clap, Gus wants to jam (music makes its way into all the Pete the
Cat books), and Alligator wants to eat. For his part, Pete is tired and knows
there has to be a way to get all his friends to relax and sleep. His “groovy
idea” is to read “his favorite bedtime story” out loud – it happens to be
called Pete the Cat and the 10 Little
Monsters, so there is a bit of self-reference in this book just as in Imaginary Fred. Pete’s reading engages
the friends’ attention, and soon he notices that things have gotten quiet, and
sure enough, “They all settled down. No one made a sound.” And so all the
friends go to sleep and dream of the fun they will have the next day. Like many
Pete the Cat books, this one has a thin plot and mildly amusing drawings. In
fact, the numerous small pictures of Pete on the pages after the story ends are
more fun than many of those within the main pages: the little ones show Pete in
green-and-white-striped pajamas and holding a big tube of toothpaste, dressed
in a Super Cat T-shirt, playing in a cardboard box, wearing a floppy hat that
says “Pete,” playing guitar, and more. Also attractive is the door hanger bound
into the book, which says, on one side, “Shhh! This cool cat is trying to
sleep.” On the other side, it says “Come in and hang out!” and shows Pete
playing with the friends featured in the book. Pete the Cat and the Bedtime Blues is strictly a book for existing
fans of the title character – there is not very much to it that will likely
attract kids unfamiliar with Pete’s personality, and it is not an especially
good introduction to the many books about Pete. So it gets a (+++) rating for
those not already enamored of the perpetually sleepy-eyed cat, although for
those who have enjoyed other Pete productions by Kimberly and James Dean, this
will be a (++++) book and a pleasant, uncomplicated bedtime story.

Pretty much all diets work.
Yes, they do. It’s people who don’t
work. The reason dieters almost inevitably fail to take weight off and keep it
off has to do with motivation, stick-to-it-iveness, will power, whatever you
want to call it. Oh, and human nature: deprivation is not something to which
most people willingly attach themselves. And diets are a form of deprivation:
their creators tell you what you can eat, what you must eat (most people do not
take kindly to being ordered around, especially when bodily functions are
involved), and what you must not eat.
So the question for anyone wanting to lose weight is which yes-it-works diet he
or she will follow until the deprivation and demands become too much, leading
to quitting that diet, gaining the weight back, and finding another diet that will work – as long as the dieter is
sufficiently dedicated and obedient, preferably for the rest of his or her
life.

This is a distinctly
unpleasant scenario, and these days purveyors of diets know that a big part of
what they must do in order to obtain adherents and make money from their diet
books is to make a diet easy, simple, uncomplicated, and easy (yes, twice as
easy is better) – and if they can make a diet fun, or at least make it seem to be fun, so much the better. Until
someone comes up with a pill that magically melts fat, especially in specific
body areas where people want the fat to disappear, a diet that is easy to
follow and even fun is akin to the Holy Grail.

So, yes, Liz Vaccariello’s
latest entry in the grail sweepstakes will work for those who follow it. The
editor-in-chief of Reader’s Digest
has been down this road before (The
Digest Diet, 21-Day Tummy Diet) and knows the formula for convincing people
that this book is the answer to all their dieting needs,
the solution to all their weight woes. It does help, however, to read the
disclaimers carefully. That subtitle, “Lose Up to 5 Pounds in 5 Days”? Well,
“up to” could mean losing zero pounds, or half of one. That’s called the
English language. And in tiny type on the back cover, attentive readers will
find the eternal legalese associated with all diet books in our hyper-litigious
culture: “How much weight you lose will vary depending on your gender, age, and
starting weight, plus what you typically eat and how much you exercise, among
many other factors. Even using the same program of diet and exercise,
individual results will vary. Losing 1 pound a day is not a typical result.”
Gives a whole new perspective to the words “up to,” doesn’t it?

But just as pretty much all
diets work, pretty much no diet makes it into book form without a touch of
hype. Make that a touch and a half. Vaccariello’s latest is no different. Nor
is it different in the inside-the-book disclaimers that, like the one on the
back cover, tell readers that things are not quite as simple and not quite as
guaranteed as the book's overstated title and subtitle (and Vaccariello’s cover
quote, “My easiest plan yet!”) would indicate. Just how easy, flexible and
simple to follow is this diet? “It’s best to eat meals approximately 4 hours
apart. And try to allow no more than 5 hours between meals.” “While the plan is
designed so that you don’t need to count calories, it’s best to be aware of
your overall calorie intake.” “For best results, I suggest that you measure or
weigh the food in your plan as frequently as possible…” “You can enjoy a 12-oz
glass of beer or 6-oz glass of wine in place of a snack once or twice a week.”
Get those scales, schedulers and substitution lists ready, folks – for this
diet as for all the others!

So what is different about Reader’s
Digest Stop & Drop Diet? The presentation is relentlessly perky, for
one thing, and Vaccariello’s discussions and recommendations are
straightforward, written in easy-to-understand language, and presented in the
pithy style for which Reader’s Digest
has long been known. The book has a reasonably easy-to-follow approach to
weight loss: three types of meals called “kickstart” (to get things going),
“steady loss” (to keep them going) and “maintain” (essentially a lifetime eating
plan to use after reaching your goal weight). It has color coding that makes it
easy to follow what Vaccariello is recommending: generally, columns in red are
“don’t eat this” and ones in green are “eat this instead” (although some “yes”
colors vary confusingly). It has side-by-side layouts of “bad” and “good” meals
that make it very simple to see where your calories come from and how much you
can reduce them by making different food choices – although some of the “bad”
meals shown are deliberately structured to overstate Vaccariello’s case (e.g., a lunch including potato salad,
deli coleslaw and a Ghirardelli Double Chocolate Brownie in addition to a
hamburger on Kaiser roll with two slices of American cheese).

What really makes the book
special, though, is Vaccariello’s willingness, even eagerness, to name names.
She gives specific brand-name foods and restaurant meals to eat and not to eat:
one “kickstart dinner” includes Lean Cuisine Culinary Collection Herb Roasted
Chicken, for example, and another uses “Marie Callender’s Chicken Pot Pie (remove
the top crust),” while one snack is a Klondike No Sugar Added Krunch bar and
another combines a Starbucks Chocolate Cake Pop with a Starbucks Tall (12 oz)
nonfat cappuccino. Hyper-specific recommendations like these make it much
easier for dieters to follow the Reader’s
Digest Stop & Drop Diet both at home and when out-and-about.

The very best pages here,
which are also the most visually striking, are the ones with “stop eating”
recommendations in the left-hand column and “start eating” ones on the right.
The words “stop eating” are in red, and each listed item is preceded by a red “x.”
The words “start eating” are in green, and the recommended foods (many of which
are pictured) are listed with green check marks. The specificity here is what
makes these pages so useful. Among packaged cereals, for example, one item that
Vaccariello says to stop eating is half a cup of Grape-Nuts (210 calories);
instead she suggests, among other possibilities, three-quarters of a cup of
Kellogg’s All-Bran Original (120 calories, 15 g fiber). Instead of Au Bon Pain
Eggs on a Bagel with Bacon and Cheese (560 calories, 22 g fat), she suggests Au
Bon Pain Egg Whites, Cheddar, and Avocado Breakfast Sandwich (310 calories, 17
g fat) or a McDonald’s Egg McMuffin (300 calories) – or perhaps certain
specified items from Starbucks, Tim Horton, Taco Bell or Panera. By
acknowledging that many people prefer to eat restaurant food (“fast” or not)
and buy packaged foods, and finding ones that can reduce caloric intake without
requiring people to change their food-buying habits dramatically, Vaccariello
provides a real service. She recognizes that serious dieting is itself a
life-changing experience, and by telling readers (and showing them through the
book’s photos of meals and products) that it need not be completely wrenching,
she makes it possible to attempt the Reader’s
Digest Stop & Drop Diet without feeling in advance that the diet’s
demands are more than you can bear – a self-defeating attitude that rapidly
leads to dietary self-defeat.

However, a reality check:
the vast majority of people who try the Reader’s
Digest Stop & Drop Diet will not
succeed. This is why Vaccariello gets to write multiple diet books. Depending
on which source you consult, you will find that 65% to 90% of dieters are not
successful at getting to their desired weight and staying there. The time to
regain varies, but the weight does come back. There are many explanations for
this universally acknowledged reality, ranging from will-power deficit to
genetic determinism to a failure to incorporate sufficient exercise into one’s
life (this last being a recipe for all the “easy exercise” books out there). In
truth, the reasons people regain weight vary substantially, and there is
probably some truth to all the analyses and complete truth to none of them. This
does not mean you should throw up your hands in despair if you truly want to
lose weight – but neither does it mean that you should deem Reader’s Digest Stop & Drop Diet the
perfect solution to weight loss. It is not; pretty much all diets work, but
pretty much all dieters fail. The most
basic requirement of dieting is one that is extremely simple to state but
extremely difficult to manage in everyday life: take in fewer calories than you
burn (a calorie is a measure of heat as well as energy), and increase the
number you burn by becoming more physically active. Ultimately, if you boost
your physical activity and reduce your food intake, it does not much matter how
you get to a state of fewer-calories-in-than-out – the basic approach is
foundational to all diet books, including Reader’s
Digest Stop & Drop Diet. If this book helps you focus on food
differently so that you can succeed in rebalancing calories in and calories
out, then it will be a valuable resource. If not, you can always wait for
Vaccariello’s next diet book.

Toward the end of his short
life – he died before his 51st birthday – Mahler wrote music that,
while still psychologically and emotionally autobiographical, became
increasingly forward-looking in its disruptions of tonality and use of unusual
instrumental effects. Both the Ninth Symphony and the unfinished Tenth bear
witness to this, the Tenth above all – because even though Mahler left the work
incomplete, its full shape and virtually its entire structure were finished,
and only matters of orchestration were left behind at his death. Given the
likelihood that this brilliant conductor-composer would have refined many
instrumental touches as he moved the music toward completion, it is impossible
to produce the Tenth that Mahler would have written had he lived to finish it.
But a performing edition is relatively easy to create – at least by comparison
with, say, a four-movement version of Bruckner’s Ninth, whose finale was left
woefully incomplete. With all due respect to Joe Wheeler, Clinton A. Carpenter
and others who have created performable versions of Mahler’s Tenth, the best
available one remains the creation of British musician and musicologist Deryck
Cooke (1919-1976), which was first performed in 1964 and finally published, in
revised form, in the year of Cooke’s death. This version gets a highly
sensitive, elegantly phrased and very well-paced reading from Orchestre Métropolitain under Yannick Nézet-Séguin on a new ATMA Classique CD. From the very quiet,
not-quite-ominous start of the first movement to the bizarre-sounding muffled
drum that ends the fourth movement and opens the fifth, Nézet-Séguin focuses on instrumental details to excellent effect. Mahler
always brought chamber-music clarity to his orchestrations, and Nézet-Séguin is sensitive to this persistent nuance, which is especially
important in the Tenth. Yet when Mahler calls for a very full sound, as in the
notorious dissonant chord that climaxes the first movement and reappears in the
fifth, Nézet-Séguin gets it in from the orchestra
in a strikingly effective way. A firm understanding of the symphony’s structure
underlies this performance: extended opening and closing movements, scherzos
for the second and fourth movements, and a very short central movement dubbed
“Purgatorio” by Mahler create an archlike arrangement that parallels that of
the Seventh but to very different effect (the Seventh has two Nachtmusik movements framing a central
scherzo). Nézet-Séguin chooses tempos that keep the
music moving at a leisurely but firm pace, and he pays close attention to
Mahler’s careful rhythmic contrivances and his increasing willingness to use
significant dissonance to highlight important emotional elements of the score.
This is a very convincing reading of Mahler’s Tenth, one that shows Nézet-Séguin emerging as a Mahler conductor of considerable sensitivity
and understanding, and one that places the unfinished Tenth quite firmly in the
Mahler pantheon even though, had the composer lived, he would surely have
modified it in ways that will be forever unknowable.

Mahler’s later symphonies no
longer draw directly on the songs that were so central to his first four, but
there remains something extraordinarily songful about them, up to and including
the Tenth. The yearning phrases, the soaring solo instrumental lines above
sections or the full orchestra, the sense of an inward as well as physical
journey – all these Mahler retained and continued to employ even after he
ceased to use his song cycles directly in symphonic construction. A well-sung
CD such as the new Ladybird release featuring Swedish baritone Peter Mattei
shows just how strongly the orchestral-song form permeated Mahler’s music, late
as well as early. There are 15 songs here, six from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the four that make up Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen,
and the five Rückert-Lieder.
It would be good to hear Mattei sing all the Des Knaben Wunderhorn
songs – his strong, sure, sturdy voice fits those offered here particularly
well. The six on this disc are Der
Schildwache Nachtlied, Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht?, Des Antonius von Padua
Fischpredigt, Lob des hohen Verstandes, Revelge, and Der Tambourgesell. In all the songs, martial or light, serious or
amusing, Mattei delves into the words’ meaning and helps bring out Mahler’s
expressiveness through his clear enunciation and careful phrasing. The Norrköping Symphony Orchestra under
Jochen Rieder backs him up sensitively, coming to the fore when appropriate but
generally playing in partnership in a way that highlights the songs’ emotional
content. This is true in the two complete song cycles as well: the Schubertian
feelings of Lieder
eines fahrenden Gesellen come through clearly here, and the
Rückert-Lieder
are particularly effective, although they conclude in a downbeat (or at least
equivocal) mood in the sequence Mattei uses, which places Ich
bin der Welt abhanden gekommen
last. The biggest lack here is the complete absence of texts for the songs –
yes, they are available with an online search, but there is no good reason to
fail to include them with a CD such as this one. Nevertheless, this is a disc
that amply shows the importance of song to Mahler’s symphonic music – as well
as in its own right.

Symphonies are far less
crucial to Saint-Saëns’ oeuvre than to that of Mahler, for whom
they were central. Saint-Saëns
did write five symphonies, but only the last, the “Organ,” is still played with
any frequency – and is listed as No. 3, since two of the symphonies remain
unnumbered. One of those two, written in 1856 and called “Urbs Roma,” is the
centerpiece of Marc Soustrot’s third and last Naxos CD of Saint-Saëns’ symphonies. This work is a large but
not grand-scale offering in F that was so well received at a competition organized
by the Bordeaux Société Ste. Cécile that it won the group’s prize. However, the
composer himself did not think especially highly of the symphony, which was not
published during his lifetime – and Soustrot’s performance helps show why. The Malmö Symphony Orchestra plays well, but the
symphony is generally rather turgid, Saint-Saëns’ usual thematic fluidity and lightness of orchestration being
largely absent here. The best movement is the finale, a theme and variations in
which Saint-Saëns shows his
skill in the form; the second movement, a scherzo, also has some pleasantly
Mendelssohnian moments. As a whole, though, “Urbs Roma” (which, despite its
title, has no apparent connection to the city) is rather underwhelming:
well-constructed, certainly, but not especially convincing and not among Saint-Saëns’ best works. It is offered on this CD
with two of the composer’s four symphonic poems, La jeunesse d’Hercule
(1877) and Danse macabre (1874), the
most popular of the four (the other two symphonic poems, Le rouet d’Omphale [1870] and Phaéton [1873], were included with
the symphonies heard on the two earlier releases in this series). Danse macabre, lightly and interestingly
orchestrated (with scordatura tuning
of the solo violin), sweeps by quickly, tunefully and evocatively, justifying
its popularity. La jeunesse d’Hercule,
more than twice as long and with much more elaborate orchestration, sounds
somewhat overdone and over-complex, although it has many melodic and rhythmic
felicities that would repay more-frequent hearings. This CD is a worthy
conclusion of Soustrot’s cycle of the Saint-Saëns symphonies and symphonic poems, and certainly worthwhile for anyone
interested in forays into some of the composer’s large-scale but infrequently
heard music.

Saint-Saëns’ symphonic poems are independent
of each other, for all that three of the four draw on mythological themes. In
this respect they follow Liszt’s, which were Saint-Saëns’ models. Smetana,
however, used symphonic poems differently. He too was strongly influenced by
Liszt, especially the Faust Symphony and Die Ideale. But Smetana used the Liszt influence in the
cause of Czech nationalism – somewhat as Liszt himself used his musical
abilities in the service of Hungary. The six-symphonic-poem cycle Má Vlast is Smetana’s crowning
orchestral achievement, and although it is not thematically united to the
extent of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade,
it offers several recurrent musical passages that give it considerable unity
and turn it into something approaching a vast nationalistic symphony. For
example, the theme of the first movement, Vyšehrad,
recurs near the end of the second, Vltava,
when the river flows majestically past the ruins of the old castle; and the
thematic connections of the final two movements, Tábor and Blaník,
are so numerous that it would make no sense to perform one of them without the
other. A 2007 performance of this cycle by Theodore Kuchar and the Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra, now
available on Brilliant Classics, gives the music its full weight and a great
deal of martial heft into the bargain. The orchestra sounds somewhat harsh at
times, particularly in the brass, and Tábor
and Blaník come across
perhaps a bit too jingoistically – although the effectiveness of their music,
notably the march that concludes the whole cycle, is considerable. Kuchar does
particularly well with the intense episodes of all the symphonic poems – for
example, giving relatively short shrift to the contrasting emotional sections
of Šárka while driving the intense passages vividly. The cycle
generally works well with this treatment, except in the most relaxed symphonic
poem, From Bohemia’s Meadows and Forests,
which comes across rather too stridently. As a whole, though, this performance
gives Má Vlast plenty of
symphonic heft and all the drama that Smetana packed into it.

Unlike Smetana, who wrote
only one symphony, the early Triumphal
Symphony (sometimes called Festive
Symphony), Schubert wrote symphonies throughout his life, frequently
completing only portions of them. The famous “Unfinished” is in fact just one
that he did not get all the way through. Schubert left so many symphonies
incomplete that even their numbering is confusing: the “Unfinished” is often
referred to as No. 8 (because No. 7 exists in short score only) and the “Great
C Major” as No. 9 (its title distinguishing itself from the “Little” No. 6 in
the same key). However, sometimes the “Unfinished” is designated No. 7 and the
“Great C Major” No. 8, as if No. 7 does not belong in the numerical sequence at
all; this is how the two are numbered on a new CD featuring Philippe Jordan
conducting the Wiener Symphoniker – a live recording on the orchestra’s own
label. Whatever numbering one prefers, it is these two symphonies that are
generally acknowledged as the pinnacle of Schubert’s symphonic achievement, and
they give orchestras as warm and well-rounded as the Wiener Symphoniker ample
opportunity to showcase their expressive skill. Jordan’s performances are
beautifully lyrical, emphasizing the dynamic contrasts in both symphonies –
starting with an almost growling opening for the “Unfinished” that soon turns
into smooth flow that is in its turn interrupted by outbursts that sound as
surprising as they are dramatic. An unusual characteristic of this truncated
symphony is that its two finished movements (Schubert did sketch part of a
third) are close to the same length and in essentially the same tempos: Allegro moderato and Andante con moto. Clearly aware of this,
Jordan handles the second movement as largely an extension of the first, with
strong sforzandi and more strongly
contrasted dynamics than conductors typically seek. The result is a very vivid
reading that makes Schubert’s failure to complete this work all the more unfortunate.
Jordan’s way with the Ninth is equally convincing and equally winning. Again he
focuses on the work’s dynamic contrasts and sudden shifts in tonality, here
also allowing the symphony’s constant forward motion to sweep the orchestra and
audience along with what feels like inevitability. Abetted by unusually clear
and well-balanced recorded sound, the orchestra – which itself plays with
exceptional clarity and sectional balance – shows again and again a sublime
taste for lyrical phrasing and rhythmic pungency. This is an exceptionally convincing
performance of Schubert’s final symphony, sensitive to the work’s overarching
structure and embracing its length without making excuses for it: the melodies
flow on and on, and Jordan encourages them to do just that, choosing tempos
judiciously, never rushing, never pushing the music unduly. This is one of the
best recent pairings of these familiar works, giving them a freshness that
speaks as clearly to their beauty of sound as to their structural innovations.

Schubert’s symphonic
characteristics – the unending flow of gorgeous melody, the unexpected and
abrupt key changes, the warmth and lyricism – also pervade his other orchestral
music, a case in point being his incidental music to Rosamunde. This was a very unsuccessful play (it lasted all of two
performances) written by the same “bluestocking” who created the rather
incoherent libretto for Weber’s Euryanthe,
another work with wonderful music in the service of a less-than-wonderful plot.
Schubert wrote the Rosamunde music in
haste, reusing some earlier material as well as composing new pieces. For
example, for the overture he reused a piece intended for his opera Alfonso und Estrella, then later decided
a better overture would be one he originally wrote for Die Zauberharfe. A new Brilliant Classics release of a decades-old analog
recording of the complete Rosamunde
music provides an unusual opportunity to hear a first-rate performance of
first-rate material written for a second-or-third-rate play. Dating to 1977,
the recording features the lovely voice of soprano Ileana Cotrubas, fine choral
singing by Rundfunkchor Leipzig, and absolutely lovely orchestral playing by
Staatskapelle Dresden. Willi Boskovsky, one of the very best conductors of his time
for semi-light music (notably that of the Strauss family), paces the 12 numbers
(including both overtures) sensitively, carefully and with elegance aplenty.
Like the release of Mahler songs with Peter Mattei, this recording offers no
texts – an omission that is even more unfortunate here, since the words to Rosamunde are not as readily available
as are those to Mahler’s vocal works. On the other hand, the verbal elements of
Rosamunde were never considered a
strength, and vocal segments such as the choruses of the shades and the
huntsmen come through very effectively thanks to Schubert’s music, even if the
precise words will be unclear to non-German speakers. What will be very clear
indeed are the manifest beauties of the score – even those who saw and savaged
the play took note of Schubert’s wonderful music. The same loveliness that
Schubert brought to his symphonies is very much in evidence here, and a
performance as fine as this one shows why the Rosamunde music has so long outlived the stage work for which it
was created.

Monteverdi and Bach did it.
Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven did it. Dvořák
did it professionally. Yes, they all played the viola – which makes the paucity
of solo works for the instrument all the more puzzling. The viola came into its
own soloistically only in the 20th century, thanks in large part to
violist Lionel Tertis (1876-1975), in part to the concertos of Walton and Bartók, and in part to the instrument’s
frequent promotion by Hindemith – who, among other things, gave the first
performance of the Walton concerto that had been written for Tertis.
Hindemith’s music can be on the prickly and somewhat academic side, without
easy access for either performers or listeners, but there is no question that
his sonatas for viola and piano (and those for solo viola) are foundational for
contemporary violists and highly significant for the history of the instrument.
Geraldine Walther and David Korevaar give fine accounts of three of the
viola-and-piano sonatas on a new MSR Classics CD that will do nothing to dispel
the notion of Hindemith as a difficult-to-listen-to composer but that
nevertheless presents an excellent opportunity to hear just how skillfully he
found ways to make the viola into an important instrument for chamber music. The
three sonatas heard here include Hindemith’s first and last for these
instruments. Op. 11, No. 4, from 1919, essentially indicates Hindemith’s
decision to make the viola his favored performance instrument instead of the
violin, which he also played well. The sonata has an odd three-movement
structure, with a short opening Fantasie
succeeded by two longer theme-and-variation movements that both ring changes on
the same theme. Tonality is stretched to and past its limits here, and
expressiveness can be on the strange side, as in an outré fugal variation that
Hindemith said should sound “bizarre and clumsy.” There is little charm to this
sonata, but much of intellectual interest. Op. 25, No. 4, from 1922, is more
conventional in some ways, but not in others: the piano rather than viola takes
center stage at many points, and the finale’s insistent rhythms sound as if
they had been penned by Bartók.
The last Hindemith viola-and-piano sonata, which bears no opus number, dates to
1939 and actually shows a somewhat softer side of the composer, to the extent
that he has one. This is a four-movement work whose second movement has a
fresher, more open sound than is usual for Hindemith and whose third, marked Phantasie, is written in a more-melodic
style than would be expected after hearing the other viola-and-piano sonatas on
this disc. It is unlikely that Hindemith’s music will become as appealing to
mainstream listeners as it is to professional musicians – like Reger, Hindemith
had vast knowledge but great reluctance to share any personal emotions or
feelings with audiences, with the result that his music, again like Reger’s,
tends to come across as distant and cold. But this is a very fine disc for
people who do like Hindemith and, in particular, cherish his contribution to
the viola literature.

Not that the viola is the
only instrument of longstanding use that has had a dearth of solo material. The
bassoon long had a similar fate: although Vivaldi wrote more than three dozen
concertos for it, and Mozart contributed one, the bassoon was relegated to
clown-of-the-orchestra status starting in the early 19th century (despite
its lovely presence in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4). Like the viola, the bassoon
has flowered as a full-fledged solo instrument in more-recent times, as is
evidenced by the seven bassoon-and-piano pieces played by Matthew Morris on a
new MSR Classics release. Three of these works – by Arnold Cooke (1906-2005),
Boaz Avni (born 1965) and Verne Reynolds (1926-2011) – are full-fledged
three-movement sonatas. Two pieces are three-movement sonatinas, one by Richard
Cioffari (born 1947) and the other by Halsey Stevens (1908-1989). Edouard
Flament (1880-1958) contributes a one-movement Concert Piece, and John Boda (1922-2002) is represented by a
two-minute Caprice that would stand
as a fine encore were it not placed second-to-last on the disc rather than at
the end. Actually, the first and last pieces on the CD, those by Cooke and
Stevens, are in many ways the most traditionally constructed and classically
balanced, so they make good metaphorical bookends for works that treat the
bassoon in some more-contemporary ways, such as Avni’s contrast of a
first-movement doloroso with a
second-movement festivo and Reynolds’
piece with its “Riffs and Responses” finale. Both pianists give Morris strong
support that keeps him front-and-center – Fisher in the works by Cooke, Avni,
Cioffari and Stevens, Kim in those by Reynolds, Flament and Boda. None of the
works here is really an undiscovered treasure, at least for listeners, although
bassoonists unfamiliar with these mostly modern pieces will likely welcome the
chance to hear them and perhaps perform at least some of them. The main
attraction here is Morris’ playing: he has excellent breath control, a very
even sound throughout his instrument’s range, and the ability to make even the
often rather squeaky high notes of the bassoon sound as if they are an integral
part of its compass rather than an afterthought. There is also some pleasant,
old-fashioned fun with the bassoon sound here, in Boda’s work and the fast
movements of several others.

Even more old-fashioned than
the bassoon is the chalumeau, although both instruments can be traced back to
roughly the same time (the four-key bassoon, for which Vivaldi, Bach and
Telemann wrote, dates to about 1700, as does the most-advanced chalumeau,
before the clarinet began to supplant it). The recorder was also in its heyday
– actually toward the end of it – at this time. There has been something of a
recorder revival recently, but it takes a musician with the skill and
determination of Nina Stern to attempt something similar for the chalumeau. The
MSR Classics release called Amaryllis
offers a dozen tracks of almost entirely unfamiliar music (although it does conclude
with a Telemann Fantasia and, at the very end, Greensleeves) performed by Stern on recorder (actually various
recorders) and chalumeau, with percussionist and frame-drum expert Glen Velez
providing not so much backup as full partnership. The CD is perhaps too highly
personal in its musical selections to reach out to a wide audience – the music
is, in truth, all over the place, drawn from various time periods and including
both instrumental and originally vocal works, both ones written for the
instruments heard here and ones that are transcribed. Certainly Stern’s and
Velez’s interests are wide-ranging: they have to be, to offer pieces from 12th-century
Armenia as well as Baroque-era Germany. The longest and shortest works here are
both by Jacob van Eyck (c. 1590-1657), clearly one of Stern’s favorites: four
pieces here are by him. But although individual works here have their own
attractions, it is the disc as a whole that is really of aural interest:
hearing these woodwind and percussion instruments in these particular
combinations in music of such different provenances is, to put it simply, an
unusual experience – and a salutary one for ears accustomed to less-varied and
more-familiar fare. However, unconventionality does not in and of itself
produce staying power: this is not the sort of disc that is likely to bear
repeated listenings for most people once its original novelty (which is
considerable) wears off. It represents some very personal music-choosing and
music-making by both Stern and Velez – a fact that makes it initially attractive
but that means it is somewhat too individualized to wear well over time.

October 22, 2015

It is hard to accept that it
has been the better part of a generation – 18 years, since 1997 – since we
first met Harry Potter, “the boy who lived,” and were first immersed in J.K.
Rowling’s astonishingly vivid world of magic and muggles through Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
(unfortunately retitled Harry Potter and
the Sorcerer’s Stone for American consumption, losing some resonance and
sense of real-world history through the change). Once ensconced in the
consciousness of young readers and adults alike – Rowling’s books were
extraordinarily rare in their ability to bridge very large age gaps – Harry and
his cohorts never went away, becoming societally ubiquitous through seven
books, eight feature films, spinoffs and Web-based sequels and expansions and a
great deal more. The visual elements of Rowling’s books were always important
to their effectiveness: Jonny Duddle did the British children’s editions,
Andrew Davidson the British adult paperback versions, and Mary GrandPré the U.S. editions published by
Scholastic. But as fine as these illustrators’ works were, they were incidental
to the story Rowling told, not integral to it. Now that the Harry Potter books
are affirmed as modern classics on the level of the works of C.S. Lewis, E.
Nesbit, perhaps even J.R.R. Tolkien (three other British authors known by their
initials rather than their full names), it is possible to envision them with
illustrations that pervade the pages from start to finish, drawing upon and
expanding the textual elements and turning the series into something lying
somewhere between graphic novels and traditional illustrated books.

This can work only if the
illustrations are exceptional ones, and those by Jim Kay most assuredly are. Kay
does darkness particularly well, hinting even in this earliest and least-dark
of the novels at some of the demonic depths that will emerge later. The spiders
in Harry’s under-the-stairs cubbyhole, which emerge from a very darkly tinted
scene to walk across the next page, are just one example of foreshadowing here
(whether intended or not). For that matter, Hagrid, although a decidedly good
and at times a comic character, shows in Kay’s illustrations as a great bear
looming over everyone and everything he encounters, a coiled mass of power just
waiting to erupt. Kay is simply brilliant at capturing visually the essence of
characters such as Draco Malfoy (thoroughly chilling as a handsome but deeply
cold preteen) and Albus Dumbledore (more careworn, older-looking and somewhat
more cerebral than when seen elsewhere). The ghosts that appear before the
Sorting Hat does its duty are genuinely chilling here, and the hat itself, a
kind of patchwork Easter bonnet, is simultaneously hilarious and more than a
touch scary: a long green feather protruding from it looks disturbingly like a
Lovecraftian tentacle. Even more doom-shadowed is Severus Snape, the first view
of him showing him so dark – in front of a wall of many mysterious objects and
potions – that he seems more background than foreground, more an absence than a
presence, and all the more intimidating as a result.

Nor is it only the
characters that are beautifully interpreted, or reinterpreted, here. The first
sight of Hogwarts makes it far more chilling than Rowling’s prose describes it
as being. Hagrid’s hut is a burst of color and cheer, but faintly ridiculous –
just the sort of place where Hagrid, who is faintly ridiculous himself,
belongs. A two-page, black-and-white spread of “Newt Scamander’s Guide to
Trolls” provides a surprising level of amusement in the midst of the otherwise
scary sequence in the girls’ bathroom: Kay includes “Inside a Troll’s Mind,”
where there is a little bit of room for “kittens” and even less for “keep
thinking it’s Tuesday,” and also shows a “trollwig,” known to “feed on troll
earwax.”

Harry, Ron and Hermione look only a little
like the characters as seen in the original novels, whether British or
American, and even less like their portrayals in the eight-film sequence. But
they look remarkably like themselves:
Kay has done a wonderful job of envisioning them as rather gangly,
still-finding-their-way-in-life preteens, a jumble of nerves and awkwardness
with their magical powers and all-too-human bodies barely beginning to develop.
Kay has also done simply splendidly in letting his imagination roam into visual
areas that are not crucial to the story but that enhance it significantly.
There is, for example, a gorgeous full-page display of dragon eggs “from
‘Dragon-Breeding For Pleasure and Profit,’” from the prickly, bright-red
“Chinese Fireball” to the large, pineapple-like “Ukranian [sic] IronBelly.” All
these illustrations and many more – and, on pages without illustrations, blobs
of color that could be anything from paint spatters to blood – make this
illustrated version of Harry Potter and
the Sorcerer’s Stone an experience not to be missed by existing and all-new
Rowling fans alike. At the end, when Gryffindor’s triumph over Slytherin is
affirmed, the main impression left by Kay’s illustration is of how young the principals of the story are,
how little they know of what lies ahead for them and their world, how little
they understand that the darkness they have faced and overcome in this first
book is but a small foretaste of what will envelop them in later volumes. Kay
has done something remarkable here: he has not improved Rowling’s material so much as enlarged it and re-envisioned
it, putting his own stamp on the characters, the world they inhabit, and the
trials they endure. The Harry Potter books are deservedly acclaimed as modern
classics; their illustrated versions, if Kay continues to produce them at a
level this high, will deserve the same designation – at a different place on
home and library bookshelves.

Thanksgiving at the Tappletons’.
By Eileen Spinelli. Illustrated by Maryann Cocca-Leffler. Harper. $17.99

Little Critter: Just a Special
Thanksgiving. By Mercer Mayer. HarperFestival. $4.99.

When life gives you lemons,
make lemonade, the optimistic saying goes – or, in the case of Thanksgiving,
when life gives you a whole series of food-related setbacks, make liverwurst
sandwiches. That is what the Tappleton family ends up doing in Eileen
Spinelli’s deliciously silly Thanksgiving
at the Tappletons’, a book that is as amusing and warmhearted today as when
it was first published in 1982. The new revised edition – thankfully not too
much revised – flies in the face of today’s notion of Thanksgiving as a secular
and increasingly commercial holiday: it is fully family-focused and ends with a
nonsectarian prayer that fits the holiday wonderfully and helps turn
disappointment into delight. Most of the book is about the disappointment, but
everything is told with such a light touch – and illustrated so comfortingly by
Maryann Cocca-Leffler, who did the original 1982 illustrations and then created
new ones a decade later – that young readers will know from the start that all
will eventually turn out just fine. Spinelli spins a story of calamity after
calamity: startled by the early-morning arrival of the milkman (parents may
have to explain to today’s children what a milkman is, or was), Mrs. Tappleton
drops the turkey she is about to start preparing, and it bounces down the steps
of the house, then slides on the ice outdoors all the way to a nearby pond –
where it sinks. Concealing the disaster from Mr. Tappleton, Mrs. Tappleton
sends him off to buy the traditional pies, but there is such a long line at the
bakery that he decides to stop for coffee – and by the time he gets back to the
shop, all the pies are gone. So, unsure what to do, he brings home empty boxes.
Similar holiday disasters befall the kids: Kenny cannot make the salad because
he fed all the vegetables to rabbits at school, and Jenny gets distracted by a
phone call (on a corded phone, of course) while puréeing the potatoes in the blender, resulting in an
all-over-the-kitchen mess that she barely manages to clean up before the
Tappleton parents arrive home after picking up the rest of the family members:
Uncle Fritz, Grandmother and Grandfather. Now
what? One by one, the mishaps are revealed, with everyone becoming increasingly
unhappy – and increasingly hungry – as it turns out there is no special holiday
food in the house at all. It takes the tradition of Grandmother’s Thanksgiving
prayer to make everything all right again: she reminds everybody that “we’re
together,/ That’s what matters –/ Not what’s served upon the platters.” And so
begins a search for any food that may
be in the refrigerator and cupboards, which is how the Tappleton Thanksgiving
dinner turns out to involve liverwurst, cheese, pickles and applesauce. Thanksgiving at the Tappletons’ is
quaint in some ways and certainly a tad dated in others, but explanations of
the elements that may be unfamiliar to 21st-century kids are very
much worthwhile, since they will give today’s children a perspective on the
family-focused elements of Thanksgiving that have tended to fall by the wayside
far too often in the last few years.

Family focus is important in
Mercer Mayer’s Little Critter: Just a
Special Thanksgiving as well. But here readers get an up-to-date story that
nevertheless retains some timeless qualities (and comes with a page of 20
stickers, just for extra fun). This too is a tale in which things go wrong, but
not primarily with food. Instead, Little Critter manages to get mixed up and
messed up in several ways, although – as always in Mayer’s books – everything
turns out just fine at the end. In the Thanksgiving play, for example, Little
Critter forgets his lines (he is dressed as a turkey and is supposed to say
“gobble, gobble”), so he bursts out in song instead, embarrassing the rest of
the cast (if not himself). At the Thanksgiving Day Parade, he and his friends
are marching in their costumes from the play, but Little Critter gets tired, so
he climbs onto a float and disrupts that part of the parade: “‘Hi, Mom! Hi,
Dad!’ I called. They didn’t look too happy.” A policeman gets him off the float,
and the family is not in the best of moods afterwards. Later, during a shopping
trip, Little Critter drops the turkey and spills the cranberries. But on
Thanksgiving Day itself, he helps with the cooking (as well as he can) and then
goes with the family to dinner at the community center. “Everyone from town was
there. …They invited all the critters who couldn’t have a nice dinner. That way
everyone could enjoy it together.” It is that message, of inclusiveness and
concern for those less fortunate, is the one that makes everything all right in
Little Critter’s special Thanksgiving – and can become a discussion point for a
good parent-child talk about the meaning of the holiday beyond food, football
and family festivities.

Clark the Shark: Afraid of the
Dark. By Bruce Hale. Illustrated by Guy Francis. Harper. $17.99.

The thing about Nate Wright,
chronic sixth-grade academic underachiever, is that he is not unintelligent and
not unteachable – he just has no interest in learning in an academic
environment. He much prefers to play chess, at which he excels, and to draw
comics, at which he thinks he excels. There is something resonant in Nate’s
personality for adults as well as for the younger readers at whom the Big Nate comic strip is directed; in
fact, cartoonist Lincoln Peirce (pronounced “purse”) says Nate is largely
modeled on himself at Nate’s age (which is variously given as 11 or 12). The
latest Nate collection in the AMP! Comics for Kids series is missing a few of
the elements that make Peirce’s strip particularly attractive: no Nate chess
games, no samples of Nate’s own comics (“Doctor Cesspool” and the like), not
even any scenes in the detention room (Nate is the reigning detention champ of
P.S. 38 – a distinction he relishes). Instead, Welcome to My World has strips that show ways in which Nate may be
right in thinking that life is just plain unfair to him a lot of the time. For
example, he buckles down and really studies for a test when challenged by his
brainy and arrogant student nemesis, Gina: Nate is determined to score a
perfect 100, which would give him a B for the class. And almost against his
will, thanks to tutoring from a super-brainy first-grader, he learns everything
he needs to know – he can learn when
sufficiently motivated – but then gets a 99 because he did not write his name
in the correct space. This episode casts his teacher nemesis, Mrs. Godfrey, in an unfavorable light: she is
usually tough but fair, genuinely concerned with the students and fed up with
Nate because he refuses to live up to his potential. Here she seems
unnecessarily cruel, not only through the nitpicking about name placement but
also because she refuses Nate’s request for a B for the course – which a good
teacher would see as a worthwhile motivator, since Nate fell short by a single
point. Well, so it goes: welcome to Nate’s world. In another sequence, Mrs.
Godfrey comes off no better: she sentences Nate to detention on Grandparents
Day because he arrives 20 seconds late after showing his grandmother and
grandfather around; then she decides to give a pop quiz not only to the
students but also to the grandparents. This series of strips illuminates some
of Nate’s personality – he seems to take after his grandfather – but makes Mrs.
Godfrey a less attractive character. Elsewhere here, Nate’s feckless father
tries to get Nate to stop eating so many Cheez Doodles – an attempt that
falters when Nate insists that in that case, his father has to stop scarfing
down so much ice cream. Nate’s involvements with sports teams, art (a class he
enjoys), the reading club (he comes for the snacks), junior lifesaving class
and School Picture Guy (who wears a smiley-face tie and always has a Band-Aid
on his forehead) are here in Nate’s world as well – as are his interactions
with best friends Francis and Teddy, crush Jenny, sister Ellen and the rest of
the characters who populate Peirce’s strip and keep Nate too busy to learn as
much as he is capable of learning (especially about his own limitations).

Bruce Hale’s Clark the Shark
picture books have the oversized-kid-in-toothy-guise learning things, too,
although Afraid of the Dark is not
quite at the level of the earlier books in the series. A lot of the fun in
these books comes from seeing Clark, so much bigger and so much potentially
fiercer and potentially scarier than all the other denizens of the deep,
dealing with the same issues of school and sharing and affection that everyone
in the 4-8 age range deals with, whether living on land or under water. Earlier
books about Clark worked well because they avoided being too directly learning-oriented, escaping the preachiness that can
make series such as the Berenstain Bears books tiresome. Afraid of the Dark, though, spends a little too much time on its
title topic and not quite enough letting Clark be Clark. There is only a single
page showing Clark overdoing things in his usual clumsy-but-endearing way
(Hula-Hoops, karaoke, Freeze Dance). The rest of the book focuses on Clark’s
first outdoor sleepover with friends and his attempt to deal with his fear of
the dark by repeating “a little rhyme” to himself. Unfortunately, what he says
does not rhyme and becomes a tad irritating as he repeats it again and again:
“Take heart, be smart, sharks aren’t afraid of the dark.” (This could easily
have rhymed; for example, “Take heart, smart shark – don’t be afraid of the
dark.” But it doesn’t.) As for the story, Hale has Clark and his friends
telling ghost stories (illustrated in a decidedly non-threatening way by Guy
Francis), then becoming so “shivery” that they jump with fear at a piece of
driftwood, at Clark’s mother carrying a flashlight, and at a clump of seaweed.
Eventually all the kid fish admit they are scared of the dark, so they all get
together and create a longer not-scared rhyme that is, if anything, more banal
than Clark’s original. They set their rhyme to music and all fall asleep. Lesson
learned, perhaps, but the narrow focus here and the insistence on using the
book as a teaching tool make Clark the
Shark: Afraid of the Dark a less-enjoyable entry than earlier Clark books.
It is still a (+++) book – Clark remains an attractive character, thanks
largely to Francis showing him as so outlandishly toothy but not at all
frightening – but there simply isn’t as much amusing involvement with Clark’s
antics here as in earlier books, and the teaching seems a bit too forced.

It is easy, but facile, to
assume that the standard repertoire invites standardization of performances –
that, all in all, good readings by fine conductors leading first-rate
orchestras tend to sound more or less the same nowadays, especially with the
generalized homogenization of orchestral sound in recent decades and with the
same conductor frequently serving as music director of multiple orchestras at
the same time. There is in fact some truth to this rather cynical viewpoint:
the days in which George Szell gave the Cleveland Orchestra an unmistakable
sound and Herbert von Karajan brought a unique perspective and sonic blend to
the Berlin Philharmonic are certainly over. But like most generalizations, this
one takes things a bit too far. There remain orchestras that are simply better
than the vast majority around the world, and there are still conductors whose
view of well-known music is unusual enough and is delivered with enough
intensity so that it stands out despite there being numerous more-than-adequate
performances available from a wide variety of sources. The BR Klassik release
of live recordings of the Brahms symphonies featuring the Symphonieorchester
des Bayerischen Rundfunks under Mariss Jansons.is a case in point. This is one
of the world’s great orchestras, and it plays Brahms with so much warmth,
solidity, and excellence of sectional balance that a listener can simply sit
back, whether in concert or at home, and revel in the gorgeous ebb and flow of
sound. But there is more: Jansons has his own distinct interpretative way with these
symphonies, one that will not necessarily be to all tastes but that certainly
shines new light on the works’ structure and evocative emotionalism. These
recordings were made over a period of several years: Symphony No. 1 dates to
2007, No. 2 to 2006, No. 3 to 2010, and No. 4 to 2012. But Jansons’ firm grasp
of the music and his determination to guide it down the paths where he wishes
it to go are equally clear throughout. This is most apparent in Symphony No. 1,
which is handled very broadly indeed, not to the point of over-expansion but
right on the verge of it. The first movement swells and then swells again,
growing in expansiveness to a degree that could easily overshadow the rest of
the symphony if Jansons did not reserve analogously broad and elegant treatment
for the finale. No. 2 then gets equal weightiness, so that instead of coming
across as a contrasting and altogether lighter work than No. 1, it emerges as
an elegantly paired symphony springing in large part from the same
compositional impulses that produced its predecessor. These are unusual and
highly involving approaches, although that of No. 2 is marred by the omission
of the exposition repeat in the first movement – which makes it possible to
present Nos. 2 and 3 on a single disc but which mars the overall scale of both
the symphony and Jansons’ reading.

The paired sound of
Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2 is complemented by a similar sense of duality in Nos. 3
and 4. Brahms tended to think in pairs, although not necessarily consciously –
his two very different orchestral serenades, which were in some ways precursors
of the symphonies, provide another example. In Jansons’ Brahms cycle, No. 3
retains its inevitable unity of sound and structure – it is the most tightly
knit of the four symphonies – but Jansons somewhat dials back the emotion here,
preventing the work from having an overdone swooning effect, as it sometimes
does in other readings. He nevertheless makes clear its rhythmic drive and the
way in which the movements seem so closely related to one another that the
symphony comes across as practically a single extended movement. Interestingly,
Jansons then applies a somewhat similar approach to No. 4, even to the point of
pulling forth more intensity (even, arguably, a bit too much) from the second
movement than it normally offers. Jansons gives Brahms’ final symphony a
greater sense of unity than it usually has, to the point that the concluding
passacaglia crowns the work without seeming out of place or overdone merely because
of its unusual-for-its-time-period style. Not all elements of these
performances will immediately enthrall listeners, but those that do not
captivate emotionally at the outset will likely do so on a second hearing – and
all four performances show, from start to finish, a thoughtful and thoroughly
engaged conductor leading a top-of-the-line orchestra in music that, for all
its familiarity, still retains its freshness when handled as well as it is
here.

The personal element is even
more pronounced in the boxed-set version of Mikhail Pletnev’s Tchaikovsky
symphonies, which were originally released on individual SACDs from 2011
through 2014. Like Jansons, Pletnev has an outstanding orchestra: the Russian
National Orchestra, which Pletnev founded in 1990, vaulted rapidly to the top
ranks of ensembles in Russia, which puts it very high in the European and
worldwide orchestral pantheon. Indeed, the orchestra’s first recording, of
Tchaikovsky’s Sixth, was one of the work’s best recorded performances ever, so
beautifully articulated, perfectly played and nuanced in interpretation that a
full Tchaikovsky cycle at the same level would have been one for the ages.
Unfortunately, that is not this one: this cycle is far too uneven and quirky to
deserve wholehearted endorsement. It gets a (+++) rating despite, or rather in
large part because of, the excellent orchestral playing, but many of Pletnev’s interpretations
are just too unfocused to be fully convincing. Indeed, Pletnev’s ideas can be
simply bizarre. For example, he changes tempo repeatedly and confusingly in the
four-minute slow introduction to the first movement of the Symphony No. 1 – but
wait!There is no slow introduction to the movement.Pletnev invents one, turning the start of
this Allegro tranquillo opening
movement into something sleepy and dreamlike (perhaps because Tchaikovsky
called the movement “Dreams [or Daydreams] on a Winter Journey”).Then Pletnev plays the next section of the
movement at such a breakneck pace that a lesser orchestra would have had real
difficulty avoiding sloppiness.Later in
the movement, we get further speedups and slowdowns placed hither and thither,
resulting in a disjointed, mixed-up and altogether peculiar performance.In the lovely second movement, Pletnev again
starts slowly, speeds up (but thankfully not so much), and manages to bring out
the cantabile in the Adagio cantabile ma non tanto tempo
designation only because of the great warmth and beauty of the orchestra’s
strings.At the end of the movement,
though, Pletnev slows down the proceedings so much that listeners may find
themselves nodding off: it is the orchestra that makes this recording worth
hearing, not the conductor’s view of the music. The much-better third and
fourth movements do not make up for the odd first two. Symphony No. 2, heard as
usual in its 1879-80 version, is also very well played, and there is a wealth
of fine detail in the first three movements.But the fourth movement is peculiar: it is taken unusually quickly, albeit
convincingly, at first – until the gong that heralds the final section, which
here leads to complete stoppage of the forward impetus, then a very slow accelerando, and then eventually a
conclusion so fast that even this first-class orchestra barely keeps up. The
recording also offers the original (1872) version of the first movement, a
rather paltry supplement (the entire CD runs only 48 minutes) but an intriguing
one that shows how Tchaikovsky rethought the opening of his most
folk-music-influenced symphony.

The first two symphonies’
lacks do not extend to the Third, which is a winner. The tempos are well
chosen, the balletic elements so important to this symphony are well
communicated and thoroughly understood, the lighter moments are nicely
contrasted with the more-serious ones, and the overall effect is of a
substantial work with considerable drive, brightness and elegance.The only disappointment is the third of the
fifth movements, the central Andante,
which Pletnev takes too slowly and deliberately, so that it somewhat overweighs
the symphony as a whole in its direction. The interpretation is justifiable,
but in light of the mostly jaunty tempos elsewhere, the movement seems a bit
overthought and overdone. In all, though, this is a well-done interpretation
and as well-played as are all the works in Pletnev’s cycle. The Fourth fares
very well, too. From the opening proclamation of the “fate” motif on burnished
brass, through a first movement handled with tone-poem flair so its length does
not seem ungainly and its episodic nature makes perfect sense, Pletnev shows
his clear understanding of and empathy for Tchaikovsky’s music – at least here.A second movement that nicely balances the
first, rocking gently and not wallowing in the emotionalism of the lengthy opening,
is followed by a quicksilver pizzicato Scherzo
that flits and dances here and there and enfolds a rollicking trio in which the
woodwind playing is outstanding.Then
the finale bursts like thunder on the scene, with Pletnev’s pacing and the
excellent playing of the orchestra combining to produce a thrilling and highly
dramatic conclusion.If the First and
Second are mannered and fussy in Pletnev’s readings, the Third and Fourth are
well-thought-out and well-managed.

The problem is that when
Pletnev fails, he does so on a large scale – and his Tchaikovsky Fifth is, not
to mince words, a failure.It is an odd failure, a throwback to the days
when the conductor mattered more than the composer, when Tchaikovsky’s deep
emotionalism (over-emotionalism to some) invited swooning on the podium and a
level of rubato that, far from
bringing out the inner workings and feelings of the music, inevitably imposed
the conductor’s feelings on it, and
on the audience.This is simply
unforgivable today, even when the conductor is Pletnev.His Tchaikovsky Fifth is well-nigh
incoherent, the tempos varying so much in the first and final movements that
listeners will be whipsawed rather than pulled along through this most carefully
structured of Tchaikovsky’s symphonic works.The finale is little short of a disaster, slowing down so much that the
rhythm flags, then speeding up to such a point that the beauties and the
musical lines themselves are simply lost.And the coda, which always hangs uneasily onto this otherwise profound
symphony, is a mess, so perfunctory that it seems as if Pletnev had simply had
enough of the symphony and wanted to get it over with.The orchestra’s superb playing is not nearly
enough to compensate for all the conductor’s quirks, which result in an
inelegant and ill-considered interpretation.But just when it is tempting to give up on Pletnev’s Tchaikovsky
sequence, something comes along to redeem it, such as the Sixth. Although the
reading included here lacks the elegance and some of the interpretative nuances
of Pletnev’s 1991 recording of the work for Virgin Classics, this version (which
dates to 2010) is amazingly well-played, exceptionally well-recorded (much
better than the older one), and filled with highly sensitive touches. The opening
bassoon, for example, sounds particularly gloomy here, while the gorgeous main
theme of the first movement has a yearning wistfulness that is deeply felt
without being mawkish or overdone.Pletnev has broadened his view of the symphony in the decades since the
1991 recording: the first and last movements on PentaTone are both longer than
on Virgin Classics, where they were already expansive.But nothing in them feels stretched; nor do
the middle movements sound rushed.The
second movement flows with considerable beauty and elegance, while the
scurrying, speedy opening of the third effectively introduces a movement whose
increasingly frenetic tone makes the depressive start of the finale all the
more pathétique. The last
movement starts almost languidly, moving more deeply into despair as it
progresses and eventually fading into nothingness with a very moving sigh of
resignation.This performance reaffirms
the symphony’s firm place in the classical-music canon and Pletnev’s expertise
with the work.

As for the Manfred Symphony, written between Nos. 4 and 5, Pletnev’s
performance is one of the best in this set, allowing the often-gorgeous themes
to flow freely while not engaging in the sort of overdone rubato that mars Nos. 1, 2 and 5. The beautiful second theme of the
first movement and the whole of the third come across particularly appealingly
here, and Pletnev does not hesitate to pull out all the stops in the somewhat
over-the-top finale, which even calls for an organ (speaking of “all the stops”!).
The performance is involving and flows very well, and the SACD sound is
first-rate. The bonus elements in this seven-disc package are the same ones
included when the SACDs were individually released, and they are scarcely
generous. The performances are at least serviceable, at best exhilarating, and
it is pleasant to have some shorter and mostly lighter Tchaikovsky to
complement the symphonies’ length and seriousness. It is for the symphonies,
though, that listeners will want this set – if they do want it. It is such an
odd mixture of excellence and ineptitude that Tchaikovsky aficionados will
definitely want to think twice, or maybe three or four times, before committing
to a purchase.